SolidFire nets $31M from Samsung Ventures to speed up public and private clouds

SolidFire, a maker of high-performance solid-state storage systems, has picked up $31 million in new funding and launched a new flagship storage node.

Boulder, Colo.-based SolidFire’s SSD storage targets enterprises and cloud providers that EMC and NetApp are also going after. On the cloud end, SolidFire customers usually use the hardware to speed up their public cloud offerings, but it can work for private clouds as well.

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SolidFire moved its service into general availability back in November. Since that time, the company has been hard at work on new technology and picking up more customers. Its clients include Colt, Calligo, ViaWest, CloudSigma, Crucial, and iWeb.

Today’s funding was led by new investor Samsung Ventures, with participation by prior investors New Enterprise Associates, Valhalla Partners, and Novak Biddle Venture Partners. Including the new round, SolidFire has raised $68 million to date.

“This round is designed to help us expand our sales and marketing presence,” SolidFire CEO Dave Wright told me. “.”

On top of the new funding, SolidFire has created a new flagship storage node called the SF9010 for enterprise and cloud clients that need top-tier performance. Inside a single SF9010 storage node is a 960GB Samsung SSD. A base configuration of five nodes brings the cost down to $3 per GB. The SF9010 will be available for purchase on Sept. 1.

Prior storage nodes made by SolidFire included SSDs made by Intel. Wright insists SolidFire picked out Samsung SSDs for its new unit before Samsung Ventures invested its capital and that the investment wasn’t made in tandem with SolidFire buying loads of Samsung SSDs.

“They were separate decisions made at different times,” Wright said. “It obviously ended up being great synergy.”

SolidFire was founded in 2009 and has just north of 100 employees.